A Cabinet Of Greek Curiosities

by J. C. McKeown

  When the Greeks were marching through friendly territory on the Black Sea coast, the natives showed off to them the wealthy people’s children, who had been fattened on boiled nuts, and were soft and very pale, and almost as broad as they were tall, with flowers tattooed all over them, back and front (Xenophon Anabasis 5.4). Nuts or not, it may be significant that the Greeks found jars full of slices of dolphin, preserved in salt, and others full of dolphin blubber, used by the natives as Greeks used olive oil. Perhaps surprisingly, dolphins still thrive in some parts of the Black Sea, though not in Turkish waters.

  The Persians discuss their most serious issues while drunk, and the owner of the house invites them to reconsider their decision the next day when they are sober. If their decision still pleases them, they adopt it; if not, they let it go. Likewise, whatever they discuss while sober they reconsider when they are drunk (Herodotus Histories 1.133).

  The Gauls have a strange and incredible custom that they observe especially when they are considering important affairs. They devote a human being to death and stab him with a dagger just above the diaphragm. They determine the future from the way he falls, from the way his limbs twitch, and also from the way his blood gushes out (Posidonius frg. 169).

  The Gauls accept the Pythagorean doctrine that the human soul is immortal and that, after a fixed number of years, it enters a new body and begins a new life. At funerals, some people throw onto the pyre letters addressed to the deceased, in the belief that they will read them (Diodorus Siculus The Library 5.28).

  There are people in Thrace who make a game of hanging themselves during their drinking parties. They tie a noose at a certain height, and directly under it they place a stone that is easily overturned by anyone who stands on it. They then draw lots, and the person who is chosen gets up on the stone, equipped with only a little knife, and puts his neck in the noose. Some one else comes up and moves the stone. If he is not quick enough to cut himself free with the knife, the man left hanging dies as the stone rolls away from under him, and the others laugh, regarding his death as a source of amusement (Athenaeus Wise Men at Dinner 155e).

  I have heard that there is a tribe in Ethiopia that is ruled by a dog (Aelian On Animals 7.40).

  Among the Bactrians, when people became feeble, whether through old age or disease, they used to be thrown to dogs that ate them. The dogs were reared specifically for this purpose and were called “undertakers.” The land outside the Bactrians’ main city looked clean, but inside the walls it was mostly full of human bones. Alexander put a stop to this custom (Strabo Geography 11.11). Athens was not so very different: Leontius was coming up from Piraeus, outside the north wall, when he noticed some corpses lying on the ground at the place of public execution. He wanted to look at them, but at the same time he also felt uneasy and turned away. For a while he resisted the impulse and covered his eyes, but then he was overwhelmed by the urge to look at them, so he opened his eyes wide and ran over to the corpses, saying to his eyes, “You wretches, take your fill of this lovely sight!” (Plato Republic 439e).

  When Xerxes invaded Greece, the Thracian king took refuge on Mt. Rhodope and advised his six sons not to join the invasion—he was obviously a philhellene. They disobeyed, and when they returned, he blinded them all—not a very Hellenic thing to do (Aelian Miscellaneous History 5.11).

  Ctesias, the Greek physician to Artaxerxes, the king of Persia, gives an appallingly detailed description of the execution inflicted on a soldier named Mithridates, who was misguided enough to claim the credit for killing the king’s brother, Cyrus, when he attempted to seize the throne in 401 B.C. Artaxerxes, who claimed to have killed Cyrus personally, had Mithridates sunk in a trough with only his head and limbs protruding. He was force-fed, with a mixture of milk and honey poured into his mouth and over his face, which was completely covered with flies, while maggots and worms engendered by his feces and urine ate his body, penetrating into his entrails. Mithridates died after seventeen days (Persian History frg. 26).

  The Tauri are a Scythian people. When their king dies, they bury his closest friends with him. When one of his friends dies, the king cuts off a small piece of one of his own earlobes, a larger piece if it is a closer friend. But if the dearest of all his friends dies, he cuts off the whole ear (The Vatican Paradoxographer Wonders 60).

  There are Scythians who cut up and salt the flesh of their dead and then dry it in the sun. After that they string the pieces of meat together and wear them around their necks. Whenever they happen to meet a friend, they cut off a slice of meat with a knife and give it to him to eat. They keep doing this until there is no meat left (The Vatican Paradoxographer Wonders 61).

  The Issedonians [a tribe on the Russian steppes] have the following custom. When a man’s father dies, his kinsmen drive sheep to his house. They sacrifice the sheep and cut up the meat, and they also cut up their host’s dead father. Then they mix all the meat together and serve it up as a banquet. They strip the flesh from his skull, clean it out, and gild it. They regard it as a sacred object and perform great sacrifices annually in honor of the dead man. The son arranges this for his father, just as the Greeks observe the festival in honor of their ancestors. In other respects, they are said to be just, and their women have equal rights with the men (Herodotus Histories 4.26).

  There are ways in which no one is differentiated from other people as being either a barbarian or a Greek:

  • We all breathe through our mouths and noses.

  • And laugh when we are happy.

  • And weep when we are sad.

  • And hear sounds through our ears.

  • And see with our eyes in the sunlight.

  • And work with our hands.

  • And walk with our feet.

  (Oxyrhynchus Papyri 1364 and 3647, from Antiphon’s On Truth)

  The king of Parthia, Orodes, was familiar with the Greek language and with Greek literature, and the king of Armenia, Artavasdes, actually composed tragedies, speeches, and works of history in Greek. They were listening to a performance of Euripides’s Bacchae, when the head of the Roman general, Crassus, was brought in, directly from the massacre at Carrhae [53 B.C.]. A tragic actor, Jason of Tralles, used it as a stage prop, as the head of Pentheus, while he performed the role of Agave, Pentheus’s mother, who was one of the Bacchantes who dismembered him, imagining him to be a lion. When the chorus asked Agave who killed him, Jason/Agave replied, “The glory is mine,” but Pomaxathres, who had decapitated Crassus, jumped up and seized his head, claiming that he had a better right to say this than Jason did (Plutarch Life of Crassus 33).

  Orodes II of Parthia (ruled 57–38 B.C.). Despite their oriental appearance, the Parthian kings were thoroughly Hellenized. The inscription on the reverse of this drachma, a Greek unit of coinage, is in Greek: “King of Kings, Arsaces [all Parthian rulers adopted this official name], benefactor, glorious, philhellene, just.”

  In the far north, there is no longer any land, or sea, or air, but a mixture of all three, like a jellyfish … so that it is impossible to travel through it either on foot or in a boat. Pytheas claims to have seen the jellyfish-like substance personally (Pytheas frg. 7).

  Anything that the Greeks take over from barbarians they eventually improve

  (Plato [?] Epinomis 987d).

  XI

  ATHLETICS

  Success in competition gives release from sorrows

  (Pindar Olympian Odes 2.51).

  Although the date of the first Olympic Games was usually fixed at 776 B.C., other views persisted: there is a tradition that Atreus [the father of Agamemnon and Menelaus] instituted the Olympic Games about 1,250 years ago, when he held funeral games for his father, Pelops, and that Hercules won every event at those games (Velleius Paterculus History of Rome 1.8).

  There were far fewer events in the ancient Olympics than there are now and many more states from which competitors might be drawn than there are countries competing in the modern Games (even though only Greeks were
eligible to take part; we should not of course suppose that all the more than one thousand known Greek poleis were always represented). Moreover, there was only a single winner in each event, not the three medal winners of today. Olympic success was therefore an even more notable distinction than it is now. Most states will have had to wait for many Olympiads to achieve a victory in any event.

  According to Julius Africanus Chronographiae frg. 65, the sprint (ca. two hundred meters) was the only competitive event in the first thirteen Olympic Games. It is also the only event for which he preserves an almost complete list of winners in the first 249 Olympic Games (i.e., for almost a thousand years). Athenian cultural dominance is not paralleled in athletics; Athenians won the sprint a mere eight times, the last occasion being the 110th games, in 336 B.C.

  Theocritus of Chios, a 4th-century B.C. orator (not to be confused with the Syracusan pastoral poet), was refused permission by the people of Chios to erect a statue of himself in the portico, since that honor was reserved for Olympic victors. He retorted, “If one of you wins at Olympia, move my statue to the fishmarket” (Gnomologium Vaticanum 340). If any inference can be drawn from records for the sprint, his statue may have avoided the fish market for a long time; that event was won by Chians only twice, in consecutive games by Demetrius and Eras in the mid-2nd century A.D.

  If you place heavy weights on a plank of palm wood, pressing it until it can no longer bear the load, it does not give way downward, bending in a concave manner. Instead it rises up to counter the weight, with a convex curve. This is why, according to Plutarch [Table Talk 724e], the palm has been chosen to represent victory in athletic competitions; the nature of the wood is such that it does not yield to pressure (Aulus Gellius Attic Nights 3.6).

  The people of Sybaris wanted to eclipse the glory of the Olympic Games, so they waited till the festival was being held and then tried to entice the athletes away to Sybaris with highly inflated prizes (Athenaeus Wise Men at Dinner 521f).

  At an unspecified Olympic Games, the first seven runners to finish in the sprint, the oldest and most prestigious event, were all from Croton (Strabo Geography 6.1.12).

  Astylus of Croton won the sprint and the double race in three consecutive Olympic Games. At the second and third festivals, he had himself proclaimed as a Syracusan, to ingratiate himself with Hieron, the tyrant of Syracuse. The people of Croton therefore turned his house into a prison and pulled down his statue that stood beside the temple of Hera (Pausanias Guide to Greece 6.13).

  Sotades won the long race at the ninety-ninth Olympic Games [384 B.C.] and was proclaimed victor as a Cretan, which is what he was. He styled himself an Ephesian at the next Olympic festival, after receiving a bribe from the Ephesians. The Cretans punished him for this by exiling him (Pausanias Guide to Greece 6.18). Generally speaking, there was little mobility in citizenship between poleis. A remarkable proportion of grants of Athenian citizenship, recorded mostly in inscriptions on stone, were made to bankers.

  When someone was daunted by the journey to Olympia, Socrates asked him why. “Don’t you walk around nearly all day long at home? Don’t you walk home for lunch? And for dinner? And to sleep? Don’t you know that if you join up all the walking about you do in five or six days you’d easily reach Olympia from Athens?” (Xenophon Memorabilia 3.13). Olympia is just over two hundred miles from Athens.

  A Chian was angry with his slave and said to him, “I’m not going to send you to the mill, I’m going to take you to Olympia.” He apparently considered it a far more bitter punishment to be a spectator at the Olympic Games, roasting in the rays of the sun, than to be put to work grinding flour in a mill (Aelian Miscellaneous History 14.18).

  Nasty and difficult things happen in life. Don’t they happen at the Olympic Games? Don’t you suffer in the heat? Don’t you get crushed by the crowds? Isn’t the bathing of poor quality? Don’t you get soaked when it rains? Don’t you get your fill of noise and shouting and other such unpleasant things? And yet I suppose you balance all this against the wonderful spectacle and put up with it (Epictetus Discourses 1.6).

  Around the temple of Poseidon at Corinth during the Isthmian Games, you could hear:

  • Lots of wretched sophists exchanging noisy insults, while their so-called pupils brawl with one another;

  • Lots of writers reading their stupid works;

  • Lots of poets singing their poems to an approving audience;

  • Lots of jugglers doing tricks;

  • Lots of fortunetellers telling fortunes;

  • Countless lawyers overturning justice;

  • Not a few peddlers peddling whatever they happen to have.

  (Dio Chrysostom On Virtue 9)

  During the Olympic Games the flies at Pisa observe a truce, as it were, with visitors and locals alike. Even though so many sacrifices are made, with so much blood shed and so much meat hung up, they willingly disappear, crossing to the other bank of the river Alpheus. They are just like the women there, except that they are more restrained. For women are excluded by the rules of the competition and the propriety attendant on it, whereas the flies withdraw from the rituals of their own accord, keeping away from the ceremonies throughout the whole time allotted to the Games. Once the Games are over, they come home, pouring into Elis again, like exiles granted permission to return (Aelian On Animals 5.17).

  Berenice of Rhodes was the only woman to be the daughter, sister, and mother of Olympic victors (Pliny Natural History 7.133). Other writers describe her status as even more exceptional: her three brothers were Olympic victors, the youngest winning the pancratium at three successive festivals, and she also had a nephew who won at Olympia. Both the Rhodian soccer team and the island’s airport are named after her father, Diagoras, who twice won the boxing event at Olympia. His victory in 464 B.C. is commemorated in Pindar’s seventh Olympian Ode, ninety-five lines long, which was attached in golden letters to the wall of the temple of Athena at Lindos on Rhodes.

  On the road to Olympia, before it crosses the river Alpheus, there is a mountain with high and sheer cliffs, called Typaeum. There is a law that any woman caught either at the Olympic Games or even across the Alpheus on the days when women are excluded should be pushed off these cliffs. They say that no woman has ever been caught, with the single exception of Callipateira. (Some people say her name was Pherenice.) Since her husband was dead, she dressed herself like a trainer and took her son to Olympia to compete. Her son was victorious, and her clothes fell off as she jumped the fence of the trainers’ pen to congratulate him. She was released unpunished, out of respect for her father, her brothers, and her son, all of whom were Olympic victors. A law was passed, however, that in the future trainers were to come naked to the Games (Pausanias Guide to Greece 5.6).

  I do not absolve trainers from blame in bribery scandals. They come to training sessions with plenty of money, which they lend to the athletes at a higher rate of interest than is paid even by merchants who invest in risky overseas trade. They do not care about the reputation of the athletes; they give them advice about buying and selling victory, while keeping a sharp eye on their own profits (Philostratus The Gymnast 45).

  The least successful athletes, those who have never won any victories, suddenly call themselves trainers and start shouting in harsh and barbarous tones, just like pigs (Galen Thrasybulus 5.894).

  In early times, it was the custom for athletes to compete with their clothing tucked up, but Coroebus ran naked when he won the short footrace at Olympia [in 720 B.C.]. I think he deliberately allowed his belt to fall off, realizing that a naked man runs more easily than does a man with his clothing tucked up (Pausanias Guide to Greece 1.44).

  Athletes sometimes had their penis tied up to assist freedom of movement. The foreskin was pulled forward and tied up with a string called the cynodesme, which means literally “dog leash.”

  When Herodorus of Megara blew his trumpet, it was difficult to come near him, on account of the loudness of the blast. He won the trumpet
event at all four great festivals [the Olympic, Pythian, Isthmian, and Nemean Games] seventeen times (Pollux Onomasticon 4.89). If his victories were consecutive, this would have taken sixty-eight years.

  Theagenes of Thasos was a phenomenally successful athlete in several events, winning fourteen hundred crowns at the various festivals. According to Pausanias (Guide to Greece 6.11), his father was said to have been Heracles, who visited his mother in the guise of her husband. After Theagenes died one of his enemies used to whip his statue every night. It eventually fell on him, and the dead man’s sons prosecuted it for murder. The statue was thrown into the sea. But then the crops on Thasos failed. The Delphic oracle told the Thasians to take back their exiles. They did so, but the crops still failed. The oracle told them they had forgotten Theagenes. Some fishermen caught the statue in their net, it was restored to its original position, and the famine ended. Statues of him were set up in many parts of Greece and among the barbarians, and he was thought to have the power to cure illnesses. The base of the statue on Thasos still survives, and the island’s soccer team is named in his honor.

  Polydamas of Scotussa was not only a great athlete: